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I was following a familiar route through Preservation Station towards Mensah’s private office, doing my best to tell myself that this was just like any other day.
I’d spent a lot of time in the office since I’d come to Preservation. Partly because I wanted to be close to Mensah so I could be 100% sure that she was safe and sound, but also because it was nice. I’d lounge on the couch and watch a show while she worked. Sometimes she’d talk to me about what she was doing, or her family, or recent events on Preservation. I’d tell her about what I was watching, or the latest theater performance I’d seen, or whatever else was interesting at the moment.
It was going to be just like that today, too. I just needed her to do something for me, first. Convincing her would be the difficult part, I expected. The actual implementation shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. Then, we could both relax.
I wasn’t nervous about this. I’d had the same thing done in cubicles more times than I knew about, and it had always been fine. It was going to be fine this time, too, even if the circumstances added some extra challenges that made it more risky. I trusted Mensah more than any other human I’d ever met. As long as I could persuade her to do this, it would be okay.
(Yeah, I was definitely freaking out about this.)
Mensah knew me too well. She must’ve noticed something was off when I’d asked her if she was busy today, because after the usual greetings, she didn’t sit back down behind her desk, but said, “Was there something you wanted to talk about?”
I hadn’t mentioned wanting to talk about anything when I’d messaged her. It was kind of annoying that she was this good at reading me. (Okay, come to think of it, the fact that I had asked might have been a giveaway. I had access to her calendar and most days would just show up when I saw she had nothing important scheduled. Or when I saw she had something important scheduled, if that seemed potentially unsafe.)
I hadn’t made it to the couch yet, and now I didn’t feel like sitting down, anymore. I stopped where I was: a few paces inside the room. I kept my eyes on the nearest wall, observing Mensah through my drones as I said, “I was hoping you could help me with something.”
“Oh? Of course. What can I do for you?” Mensah asked.
“It’s a maintenance thing,” I said, vaguely, because maybe it would be best to ease my way into this.
“Why don’t you ask Station Maintenance for help?” Mensah said, but then seemed to catch up fast, and added, “Oh, you mean maintenance for you? Then you should go to Medical.”
“I don’t want them to do this. I want you to do it, because I trust you more,” I said.
Mensah looked doubtful, and said, “Why would you trust me with a maintenance task? Anyone else from the PresAux team would be a better pick. Ratthi and Arada know biology, Overse has medical training, Bharadwaj has been researching constructs for her documentary, and Gurathin, Volescu and Pin-Lee all understand your bot parts better than I do. Why not ask one of them?”
“Because you’re the human I trust the most. It's a simple procedure. Almost anyone could do it. It’s just that I will have to be offline for it,” I replied.
(There was someone else I would’ve readily trusted to do this, someone who wasn’t human. ART would no doubt have been able to sort out my problem in its MedSystem, and it would’ve been safe and easy. It had already performed much more radical procedures on me while I was offline. But I had no idea where ART had gone after we’d parted ways. Even if I managed to get word to it, who knew how long it would take for it to come here or for me to travel to wherever it was. I didn’t want to have to wait that long. Not to mention that it would be embarrassing to bother it with such a minor issue.)
“The more I hear, the less I like it,” Mensah said. She had walked around her desk to stand closer to me. “Maybe you should tell me what it is that you would need me to do.”
“I need you to replace a pump,” I said, trying to keep my voice as airy as I could.
I didn’t like having to do it, but the accumulated wear and tear was already resulting in a noticeable decrease in performance reliability. I didn’t know how much longer it could keep running like this. The last thing I wanted was to end up in a situation where the stupid thing stopped working entirely at some inconvenient time, because that might lead to me failing to protect my humans. Far better to do this before it got that bad, on my own schedule.
Mensah leaned back against her desk and made an incredulous face at one of my drones. “SecUnit. You’re not asking me to help you with some kind of construct heart surgery, are you?”
“Of course not! Constructs don’t have hearts. I’m asking you to replace one of four entirely inorganic pumps. This has to be done every forty thousand hours or so. I’d do it myself, but I can’t, because of the whole ‘having to be offline’ thing,” I said, still sticking to what I hoped was a casual tone. Checking my expression, I thought I was doing pretty well. I looked neutral and not anxious.
(The 40,000 hours was entirely based on the stated expected lifetime for the part in the specifications I had gotten my hands on—the same ones that I’d used to hack my governor module. I didn’t know if that was the replacement interval cubicles or company techs used. I didn’t have a repair manual, and I hadn’t been paying much attention to the maintenance that was done to me, because why would I? I’d never cared about that sort of thing. Unfortunately, I no longer had access to a cubicle and would have to start paying more attention or I might slowly fall apart even if no one was shooting at me.)
“One of four? For redundancy?” Mensah asked, still glaring at the drone, letting my carefully controlled expression go to waste.
“Partly. Some of them have different purposes,” I said. “Two are for organic fluids and two for inorganic ones. I can manage with one out of action, but it’s not optimal.”
I had experienced it before—due to damage from being shot at, not because of wear—and it was unpleasant. There was enough redundancy to keep you functional, but it was like half your brain was offline and you were moving through one of those thick chilled liquids that humans inexplicably liked to consume. Hence my need to get this done sooner rather than later. So far, this conversation wasn’t looking promising.
“And what’s this one for?” Mensah pressed on. She was too curious and asking too many questions.
“Organics,” I said.
“A pump for organic fluids. That’s a heart,” Mensah said, then shook her head and crossed her arms. “I’m not going to perform an organ transplant on you in my office.”
“That’s not what this is!” I insisted. I pulled the replacement part out of my jacket pocket and held it out for her. “Here. It’s a simple inorganic component. Straight out of a recycler.”
The specs that I had were also the reason I was able to source new parts for myself. Since this one needed to be replaced regularly, it didn’t even include any hard-to-get proprietary materials. It had been easy to print with a specialized recycler in a public workshop. (Preservation Station has that, in spite of not having recyclers for clothes, because Preservation is weird.) I had, of course, deleted the file from the recycler’s memory immediately afterwards, because there was no way I was going to leave instructions for critical components of myself where anyone might find them.
The part was still in a sterile wrapper, but that was see-through, revealing a square shape with rounded edges, nine centimeters across, five deep. It was gray and silver, and even though the materials were not proprietary, they had long chemical names that meant nothing to me. I have way more experience with human hearts than I’d like, due to me having a lot of experience with murder. They’re squishy and easily damaged. This was nice and solid in comparison.
Mensah’s eyes had turned from the drone to the replacement part, but she didn’t take it, just stared at it like it was some dangerous alien remnant. “I still don’t understand why you can’t go to Station Medical for this,” she said.
“This isn’t a medical procedure. This is inorganic maintenance. They don’t fix bots,” I said. I knew that wouldn’t convince her. I would have to be honest and talk about emotions. Ugh. Not looking at her even with the drones anymore, I went on: "I feel much safer here. I don’t want to be offline in Medical, surrounded by people I don’t know.”
“I understand and respect your feelings, but me doing this here is the opposite of safe,” Mensah countered. “What if something goes wrong?”
“It won’t. But like I said, if it does, I can manage with one organic fluid pump. In the unlikely worst case scenario where this doesn’t work out, I promise I’ll walk to Medical myself. I’d really prefer for you to do this. I would feel a lot more comfortable. Please,” I said. The last few sentences had to count among the least SecUnit-like things I had ever said.
Mensah was quiet for a while, and I wasn’t brave enough to look at her. Finally, she said, “I still think this is a terrible idea, but if you’re absolutely sure it’s what you want...” She trailed off just short of actually promising to do it.
“I am,” I said, holding out the stupid replacement pump a little higher, offering it to her.
I risked a glance at Mensah. Her expression still seemed tense and unhappy—but she raised her hands to take the part from me.
Victory!
She was using both hands and holding the pump like something precious and fragile, which it wasn’t. It had cost me nothing, because Preservation, and she could've thrown it across the room and it would’ve still been fine to use. But this was also a perfect example of why she was my favorite human and why I was so willing to trust her.
I’d better get this over with fast, before she got second thoughts.
I crossed the remaining steps to the couch and made sure the office was set up for full privacy: all doors opaque and no one allowed to enter without warning. Then, I unzipped my jacket. I’d purposefully not worn anything under it, to minimize the undressing required. This was already awkward enough.
“Wait, you expect me to do this right away?” Mensah asked, her voice at least half a tone higher than usual. “Shouldn’t we go over the details first? What about hygiene? My office is hardly a sterile environment.”
“You’re still thinking about human surgery, which this isn’t. But I did bring you these.” I showed her a package with sterile disposable gloves, which I placed on the low table in front of the couch. “Anyway, as long as you don’t sneeze on me while my insides are exposed, I’ll be fine. It’s really simple. Look.”
I brought up the diagram I had of my internal layout and sent it to her, with the problematic pump highlighted. (It sat on the left, underneath the compartment where I kept ART’s comm.)
“That’s the one that needs to be swapped out. You’ll have to push it straight down with some force to release it. You’ll feel a click. Then, you can pull it out,” I explained. I obviously hadn’t ever done this to myself, but I had been made to do it to other SecUnits. The less said about that contract, the better. “And then you just stick in the new part. Take it out of the wrapper, place it in the same orientation as the old one, press down until it clicks. All done. Any questions?”
“Yes! A lot of them!” Mensah exclaimed. She placed the replacement pump on the table next to the gloves, making no move to put those on. “You said you’re going to have to be offline. Do I need to switch you off and on again? I don’t know how to do that.”
So, this was the tricky bit, and I wasn’t planning on describing it to Mensah in detail, because I was afraid she might back out if I did.
It obviously wouldn’t be possible to remove the pump while it was running. Not without making a huge mess. I knew there had to be a way to stop an individual pump and keep the three others online—I’d had that done to me by cubicles and company techs—but since I only had specs and not a repair manual, I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t have that kind of control over these internal components.
Lacking more sophisticated options, shutting down everything would be the simplest way to do this. But a regular shutdown wouldn’t stop the organic fluid pumps, because my stupid organic brain needs blood even when my bot parts are offline. So, in a normal shutdown situation, the pumps keep running at a low frequency on a backup battery until the rest of me boots up again, and that wouldn’t work here. I needed to do a cold shutdown that left no part of me online. Those only happen in catastrophic circumstances, and I’m not supposed to be able to trigger one myself.
It hadn’t been difficult to write code that would do it, and I was convinced it was good, but I had obviously not been able to test it beforehand. Thinking about it made my organic skin crawl. There was a name for such programs: this was literally killware. Even if it was self-limiting, it was really fucking scary. I would be completely helpless. And that was why I wanted Mensah to do the maintenance procedure.
Mensah would be the only one in the room with me. It would be okay. As long as there wasn’t a GrayCris assassination attempt, or a station life support failure, or... Yeah, even my crappy risk assessment module considered this a bad idea, but I couldn’t think about all the worst case scenarios. It was risky, but it had to be done, and it wasn’t going to become any less risky if I kept putting it off.
“I’ve got it covered,” I said, doing my absolute best to keep up a carefree appearance. “I’ll initiate the shutdown. There’s an indicator light on the pump. You’ll need to wait until that blinks out. It means it’s stopped and the fluid ports are sealed. Then, you can detach it. Once the new one is in place, that’ll bring me back online. You just need to do the swap.”
Somehow, Mensah seemed to see through my facade again, because she asked, “If you’re going to completely shut down your organic circulation, isn’t that dangerous?”
I’d hoped she wouldn’t think about that.
“Not really,” I lied.
She was aiming another skeptical look at the nearest drone. “How long can you survive without it?”
“A lot longer than a human. At least fifteen minutes, under standard conditions,” I said, quoting from the specs. I didn’t know what they considered as standard conditions, but that wasn’t relevant. “It won’t take you fifteen minutes to do the swap. It’ll take you two, at most. You could’ve done it several times in the space of the conversation we’ve had.”
"It’s been a necessary conversation,” Mensah said. “I need to know what I’m doing, because I don’t want to harm you. I’m still not at all comfortable with this. Fifteen minutes isn’t a very long time.”
“It’ll be more than enough. I promise. I’m not worried,” I said. That wasn’t a lie. I wasn’t worried about her harming me, even if I was worried about the whole thing in general, and really wanted it to be done already. “Please, can we just get it over with?”
Without waiting for Mensah to protest further, I lay down on the couch, brought my fingers to the hidden catches for opening up my ribcage and swung the maintenance panel open. The drone I’d been looking through gave me a good view of the patchwork of parts inside my chest—mostly inorganic, thankfully, but the shades of gray and blue and silver were interspersed by the red of veins and arteries and the pale pink of the lungs. Ew. I didn’t like seeing all that, so I switched to a view that only showed Mensah’s face. She looked horrified. I didn’t like that, either. I dropped the drone inputs and just stared at the ceiling with my eyes.
I heard Mensah take a deep breath. “All right, all right. I’ve got this,” she said, like she was mostly talking to herself. Then, there were some crinkling sounds; she must’ve finally opened the packaging for the gloves and started to pull them on.
“You’ve got this,” I said. “Wait for the light to go out. Press down, click, pull out, push the new one in, click. Done. I’ll wake up good as new, you can go back to work, and I can watch a show.”
“All right. I’m ready when you are,” Mensah said.
“Great. Let’s do this,” I said.
I was glad all my pumps were inorganic. It meant that even though Mensah was staring at my internal workings, she wouldn’t be able to see I was nervous enough to drive them to above-normal speeds. She might hear it, though. I hoped she was too distracted to notice.
Okay. Do the thing, Murderbot.
I counted down—“Shutdown in three, two, one”—and ran the code.
The last thing I saw was Mensah leaning over me, looking as anxious as I felt.
Forced Shutdown.
Error: Organic circulation offline.
Fatal System Error: Autonomic processes offline.
No restart.
Something was pinging me. Some kind of bot. No, wait, a system. A MedSystem. It was annoying, so I ignored it.
There was a voice, too, an agitated one repeating my name. Not my real name, just, “SecUnit? SecUnit!”
I knew that voice, of course. Dr. Mensah. What was happening?
I reached out for the nearest camera and found a cloud of my drones in a holding pattern, circling Mensah’s head. There were several other humans in the room, too: Ratthi, Gurathin, and three people I didn’t recognize who were dressed like medics. They all seemed confused, but none appeared to be in any danger or acting in threatening ways. Mensah was the most important, so I focused on her. She was standing next to a MedSys platform. Next to me.
I was laid out on the platform and connected to diagnostic leads and a power cable. Which was weird, because I didn’t remember being in a fight or getting injured, I had just been—
Oh, shit.
The maintenance procedure. Clearly, it hadn’t gone as planned. As much as I had been trying to avoid Station Medical, there I was.
“SecUnit, please, come on,” Mensah said, her tone desperate, like she was seconds away from tears. I didn’t like her sounding like that. It made me want to cry, too, except I don’t do that, because construct eyes aren’t built for it.
Right. Eyes. I’d just gone for the drones, as usual, because that felt nicer and gave me a much better view.
I looked at Mensah through my eyes, forcing myself to actually, properly face her. Since that was a little overwhelming, I just said, “Hi?”
“Oh! You really are back—oh, I’m so glad so hear your voice! Do you remember what happened?” she asked.
I obviously remembered everything up to the point when I’d shut down, but I didn’t know what had happened afterwards. I decided I should figure it out, to give myself some context.
I checked the time. It showed I’d been offline for exactly 14 minutes and 59 seconds, at which point a fail-safe mechanism I’d never heard of had kicked in and made me boot up.
Fuck. That was definitely not how I’d thought this would go.
No wonder Mensah was freaking out.
My drones had been online and recording all this time, following Mensah and me. Scrolling back 16 minutes, the footage showed me on the couch with my chest open. Mensah stood next to me while I did the countdown and then relaxed into the cushions as my system went offline. (Yeah, I had definitely seemed tense beforehand.)
It was weird and disturbing to see myself in a state even more inert than a regular shutdown. Dead, by any definition. My eyes had stayed open, but somehow, they looked different, my face blank in a way that it otherwise never was, no matter how neutral I tried to make it. (I need to learn to do that expression while conscious.)
Meanwhile, unlike mine, Mensah’s face was going through a lot of expressions, all of them anxious. After waiting for 10 seconds, she must’ve confirmed that the worn-out pump had stopped, just like everything else. She placed a cautious hand on it and pressed. At first, with far less force than required, so nothing happened. Then, looking increasingly distressed, she added her other hand and leaned into it. That did it. I couldn’t hear the click, but the part had come loose, and she pulled it out. Thankfully, at least that aspect of the cold shutdown had worked right. Good. I would’ve hated it if I had leaked on her, or otherwise made a mess in her office.
Mensah’s hands were shaky as she turned get the new pump from the table, but then seemed to hesitate. I didn’t understand what the problem was until she grabbed the wrapper that the gloves had come in and used it to protect the old part before putting it down near the new one. I wasn’t sure if she trying to keep the table clean or the pump. Maybe the latter. She wasn’t treating it like she found it dirty and disgusting. She rather seemed to be handling it with a lot of care. I felt—I don’t know what, but some kind of big emotion about this. About Mensah giving so much attention to an obsolete piece of me that was headed for the recycler. The opposite of a company tech who would’ve just tossed it in the junk heap with one hand. As much as I told myself that this was just maintenance and didn't mean anything deeper than that, my irrational organic brain didn’t seem to agree.
Mensah picked up the replacement part and took it out of its packaging. I watched her spend several extra seconds holding it over me, turning it this way and that—probably double-checking the orientation against the diagram I’d shared in the feed. I don’t think it would’ve fit in me the wrong way around, but it didn’t hurt to be cautious. She placed it in the obvious empty slot in my chest and used both hands and her body weight to snap it into position.
As far as I could tell, she’d done all of that exactly right. It had taken her three minutes and 15 seconds. A little longer than I’d thought it would, but well within safe limits.
This was when I’d expected to wake up. Except that I didn’t. Nothing happened, aside from Mensah staring at me with a frown, then calling out my name, while I stayed completely inert.
The code I’d written had been supposed to trigger the startup sequence as soon as my system registered the new part. Clearly, I must’ve fucked it up, somehow. I was sure the pump was correctly placed, looking at what Mensah had done.
“SecUnit. Come on,” Mensah said, and grabbed my shoulder to give me a nudge. “Why aren’t you waking up? Oh, I should never have agreed to this, I knew it was a bad idea,” she went on, talking to herself. “Did I do it wrong? Or is something wrong with the new pump?”
Ugh, I hadn’t told her that the whole shutdown thing was a quick and dirty workaround, and she was thinking she’d made a mistake when it had been all me.
Mensah’s expression went distant for a moment and she was subvocalizing like she was talking on the feed. I glanced at the PresAux team channel in real time and saw that there were lots of new messages. Scrolling backwards to the timestamp matching the moment in the drone footage, I found the start of the conversation: Mensah had said, Does anyone know of a way to switch on a construct that’s offline?
She didn’t stop to wait for answers, but instead, leaned over me again—to take out the pump that she’d just put in. I could see why she thought that this might be the problem. I’d told her that I’d just had the part made, and to be fair, I couldn’t be certain it was a perfect match for the old one. Still, looking at this from the future, I was pretty sure the problem had been with the shutdown code and not the replacement part.
Mensah spent the next few minutes swapping the new pump for the old, and then taking the old one out and grabbing the new one again.
During this time, the conversation in the feed had exploded. Everyone wanted to know why Mensah was asking this, and what had happened and if this was about me. (Kind of an obvious guess, since I was the only construct on Preservation, although I suppose she might’ve been talking about some mysterious new one that had just been discovered.)
Between her attempts to switch around pumps, Mensah told the others that yes, it was about me, but that it was a long story and she would explain later. (Thank you, Mensah, you really are the best.)
No one had any good solutions to offer. It’s not as if I have some convenient physical on-switch; that would be too much of a security risk. A regular shutdown would be temporary. If I didn’t wake up on my own, that meant something was seriously wrong and I needed major repairs. The team members who’d dealt with me when I’d been damaged knew all this.
Then, Ratthi said, Where are you? I’m coming over.
Gurathin said, You need to get SecUnit to Medical as soon as possible. I’ll meet you there.
Mensah replied them both with, We’re in my private office. I already alerted Medical, their ETA is five minutes.
I hadn’t noticed her contact Medical, but it was probably a private feed message and I wasn’t supposed to be reading those, so I didn’t go looking for it. I couldn’t blame her for doing it. It did seem like a logical move, given the situation, even if I didn’t think they’d be able to help.
I’m right next door. I’ll be there in two, Ratthi said.
He took almost three, and arrived just as Mensah had put the new pump in for the second time.
The mildly concerned look Ratthi wore as he entered turned into wide-eyed shock as he spotted me on Mensah’s couch with my insides exposed. “Whoa! What happened?”
“SecUnit asked me to replace a part and it went bad, somehow,” Mensah explained. I wasn’t too annoyed that she’d tell Ratthi that much. At this point, he would’ve probably found out anyway. “According to what it said before,” Mensah went on, “we’ve got seven minutes left to get it back online or it might be permanently damaged.”
“Oh, no! I figured it was serious, but this is even worse than I thought—we’re worried about lack of oxygen to its organic brain, right?” Ratthi said, zeroing in on the main issue right away. “Could we do something to help? CPR?”
“That’s not going to work,” Mensah said, motioning at the old pump on the table. “Compressing that won’t do anything.”
“What?” Ratthi said, squinting at the part. “That’s its—why is its heart on your coffee table? Is that what you were replacing? What was wrong with it? Shouldn’t you put it back in?”
That was obviously too many questions for Mensah to respond to in one go, so she just said, “That’s the old one. This whole thing was a terrible mistake, I shouldn’t have agreed to it. If it dies, I—”
“We won’t let that happen. We’ll figure it out,” Ratthi said. “So, I guess defibrillation is also out of the question. Maybe we could hook it up to an external power source?”
“I don’t think I’ve got a suitable cable in my office,” Mensah said. (She was right: she didn’t, because nothing meant for office hardware would match my specs. Not that it would’ve helped, anyway.)
They didn’t have time to come up with more creative ideas, because at this point, the medical team showed up at the door. They must’ve been talking things over with Mensah in the feed beforehand: the two medics didn’t start asking any questions about what was going on with me, let alone doing any pointless human first aid measures. Instead, Mensah closed up my chest and they moved me to a gurney. I saw her grab the old pump from the table and put it in her pocket, covered in both the glove packaging and the wrapper from the new one, before hurrying after the medics.
I fast-forwarded through the next four minutes, which just consisted of the medics, Mensah, and Ratthi rushing me through various corridors towards Station Medical. Luckily, the gurney came with a privacy filter, so no one else was going to know it was me.
Once the procession reached Medical, they took me straight to the treatment room I was currently in. Gurathin showed up from somewhere, too, as did a third medic. There was a flurry of activity around me and a lot of overlapping conversations as everyone tried to figure out what was going on and what to do. Medic One hooked me up to the power cable and Medic Three went for the diagnostic leads. And that was when I had restarted, in the middle of this chaos.
All caught up, I checked the present state of the room.
“As best we can tell, there’s nothing wrong with it. It seems to be fully back online, including the new primary pump for organic fluids,” Medic One was saying. I appreciated them using the correct terminology.
I said, “Yeah, I’m fine. I don’t need all this,” and went on to unplug the extra wiring so I could close my jacket.
Mensah was still standing next to me, leaning on the side of the platform like she might fall over. I didn’t need to hack the MedSystem (which I wasn’t supposed to do) to tell that her breathing and heart rate were elevated. I knew it was my fault she was feeling bad, and I felt kind of guilty about it.
“Maybe you should sit down,” I told her.
She let out a breathy noise that wasn’t quite a chuckle, and said, “That’s what you’re going with?”
“Could we have the room for a while?” Ratthi said, pointing his words at the medics.
“Sure. It’s probably best if SecUnit stays here for observation, anyway. Let’s say, for the next half an hour, just to be on the safe side,” Medic One said.
“We’ll let you know if anything changes,” Gurathin said. “And thank you.”
“We didn’t actually do anything. But we’re glad it’s okay,” Medic Two said.
The three medics filed out of the room, leaving me with just Mensah (still on her feet), Ratthi (with an arm around Mensah’s back), and Gurathin (looking glum, as usual). I could tell they were all trying very hard not to stare at me.
I considered leaving the room, too, so I wouldn’t have to deal with this, but I wasn’t sure my limbs would work as usual after the prolonged cold shutdown, and it would’ve been embarrassing to faceplant in front of my humans. Instead, I rolled over so they could only see my back, and I could pretend they weren’t there.
“Out of all the reckless things you’ve done, this was by far the most unnecessary,” Gurathin said.
“It was necessary,” I said. He should’ve understood that, but maybe hadn’t heard the whole story, yet. “That part had to be replaced or it would’ve stopped working.”
My drone view showed Gurathin rolling his eyes. “I got that, yes. But surely, it didn’t have to be replaced by Mensah, in her office.”
I hated it when he was right. Although he kind of wasn’t. I said, “That wasn’t the problem. Mensah did everything perfectly, and this would’ve happened no matter where we were.”
“What was the problem, then?” Ratthi asked. He let go of the half-hug he’d been giving Mensah, but stayed right next to her.
“I’m assuming it had to do with the shutdown,” Mensah said. She seemed to have regained some of her composure.
“Installing the new pump was supposed to wake me up. I don’t know why that didn’t work,” I admitted.
“Since it didn’t, what did? One moment, you were dead to the world, and then you just suddenly came back online,” Ratthi said. “Was it the power cable?”
“No. That didn’t do anything. It was an automated fail-safe,” I said.
“Hm. I think I can guess what went wrong,” Gurathin said. “How was your system supposed to detect the new part?”
I could see where he was going, but of course that wasn’t the issue. “A mechanical pressure sensor. I’m not an idiot.” Sure, I’d been stupid to put myself in this situation, but not that stupid.
“Which would send a signal that was supposed to be interpreted how?” Gurathin asked.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
He was probably right, this time.
Even my bot parts were never a hundred percent offline in a regular shutdown state. There were always some low-energy processes running that weren’t under my conscious control, just doing whatever stuff in the background that I didn’t care about. Like power management. That was how I came back from a normal shutdown. But this hadn’t been a normal shutdown. I’d stopped everything, including all that stuff, which was such a constant fact of my existence that I hadn’t even thought about it. I’d been too focused on sorting out the pump situation. I should’ve realized that without those processes, my system wasn’t going to be able to respond to any kind of signal.
I really was that stupid.
This was so fucking embarrassing that I was tempted to run the shutdown code again. I knew I would come back online 00:14:59.000 later, anyway—because somewhere in me, probably described in a part of the specs that I hadn’t bothered to read, was a timer with an independent power source and a mechanical switch, and that was the only reason I hadn’t completely bricked myself. I was only alive thanks to the company engineers who had decided to put in that fail-safe. I hated having to be grateful to them.
If I shut down again, I would make Mensah sad. So I didn’t. But I also couldn’t think of anything to say because I had really, truly fucked up. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been this ashamed in my life. I put my arm over my eyes and dropped all visual inputs, wishing I could just disappear.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Gurathin prompted.
“Fuck you,” I mumbled into my sleeve.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said.
“It’s good that we understand the problem, now, but I think that’s enough,” Mensah said, her tone steely. The planetary leader voice.
“Maybe SecUnit and Mensah would like a moment alone,” Ratthi suggested. The human friend voice.
Thankfully, Gurathin didn’t seem to want to argue more. He said, “Yes. Sure,” and then I could hear his and Ratthi’s footsteps retreating towards the door.
There was a scraping sound, and when I glimpsed through a drone, I saw that Mensah had decided to take my earlier advice: she had pulled up a chair to sit down next to the MedSys platform. She was facing away from me, which I appreciated, even if I still had my back turned towards her. I shifted the arm I’d had over my face, just crossing both arms across my chest instead.
“Are you okay, SecUnit?” Mensah asked me.
“Fine,” I said. Physically, I was. Mentally, I was a pile of spare parts ready for the recycler, but that wasn’t too unusual for me.
“And the new pump, does that feel better?” she said.
“It’s an inorganic part. It doesn’t feel like anything,” I said. I was glad about that. I didn’t want to even try to imagine the sensations of having human circulation. That would be gross. “My performance reliability is back to normal.”
I saw Mensah smile—only the slightest turn of the corners of her mouth, but still. It was nice. She said, “I’m happy to hear that.”
I wanted her to look like that all the time, and not the way she’d been looking ever since I’d walked into her office. I was surprised she didn’t completely hate me, at this point. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I really messed up.”
“Yes. I accept your apology, but you shouldn’t have pressured me so hard into doing it right away. We should’ve thought it over and planned it better,” Mensah said. She didn’t sound angry; this was softer and kinder than the planetary leader voice. “I also shouldn’t have said yes. I just really wanted to help you, and... I think a part of me was too flattered by your trust.”
“I’m guessing this means you won’t do it again,” I said.
Someone would have to, eventually. This replacement had a limited lifetime, just like the previous one, plus I had three other pumps that were subject to the same kind of wear. I didn’t know how long it would take for them to fail, but it would happen in less than 40,000 hours. Not to mention that other parts of me might also require replacing or servicing.
Mensah took a moment to think this over, looking very serious. Finally, she said, “I would do it, if you needed me to. But only under safe conditions. Certainly not in my office. If we sat down to think about it with Ratthi and Gurathin and discussed it with bot maintenance technicians and people from Medical who have relevant expertise, maybe we could figure out a way to do it without shutting you down.”
"But it’s a routine maintenance procedure,” I said. I hated the thought of involving half the station in something like that. “I wouldn’t want to make a big deal out of it.”
“When humans need surgery like this, it absolutely is a big deal. It can be very scary,” Mensah said.
“I’m not human, and it wasn’t surgery,” I reminded her.
“I know,” she said, “but it was still a vital component that needed replacing, and it’s understandable that you felt nervous about it.”
“I wasn’t...” I began, but that was such a blatant lie that I realized there was no point in finishing the sentence. I had been nervous, and she knew it, and I knew that she knew it. Whether it had been because of the part or the shutdown was irrelevant.
“It’s all right,” she said.
I didn’t know what else to say, so I stayed quiet. Mensah did, too. Somehow, it was okay and not awkward. That was one of the things I liked about being around her.
After a while, she pulled something out of her pocket: the old pump that she’d taken out, still haphazardly covered in transparent wrappers. “Do you want this back?” she asked.
“Why? It’s old and doesn’t work right anymore. It should go in a tech recycler,” I said.
She unwrapped it and held it in her palm, studying it. She said, “It was an important part of you for a long time.”
“If this had been a human medical procedure, you’d recycle any excised organics, wouldn’t you?” I said. “They’d start to rot and stink otherwise.”
“Yes. But you’re not human, and this wasn’t surgery,” Mensah said, throwing my own words right back at me, aiming a quirk of her eyebrows at one of my drones. Then, looking all thoughtful again, she went on, “You can absolutely say no, and I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but would you mind it if I kept it?”
That was a question I would never have expected to hear. It was kind of weird, and it did make me a little uncomfortable, but it also made me feel a lot of other things. Warm and good things, the same way I’d felt when I’d watched her do the maintenance procedure. I was created to be disposable, and yet, here she was, treating even a discarded part of me, a literal piece of junk, like it mattered.
I didn’t think I deserved to have such an amazing human in my life, being so nice to me. I obviously wasn’t going to say no. I would’ve given her any and all of my components if she’d asked.
I shifted to rest on my back, because somehow, it would’ve seemed wrong to reply with my face smushed into the MedSys platform.
“I wouldn’t mind,” I said. “I think I’d like that.”